World needs to recreate collective climate focus and momentum

Across the Global North, ongoing extreme climate incidents (heatwaves, forest fires, and floods) are creating costly impacts on humans and the environment.

What is incomprehensible is that as the world burns and drowns, the Global North leadership remains deeply preoccupied with “cold war” geopolitics and the quest for global political and economic control.

Serious collective and cohesive global climate debates and actions have apparently been relegated to the periphery or reduced to tokenism.

At the 2021 Glasgow COP26 climate forum, the world was evidently unanimous on climate action, urgency and timelines.

However, this lasted only a few months until Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, when the Global North abruptly switched off from collective climate debates to focus on emergent national economic crises, energy insecurity, and geopolitics moulded on the Ukrainian war. And this is where we are today.

It is only this week that the two largest carbon emitters (USA and China) are making a belated effort to jumpstart the lost global climate focus, without which all future COP forums will remain ineffective and essentially PR grandstanding occasions.

Since the war in Ukraine, and in the apparent absence of political leadership and interventions, the oil-producing companies and countries have had a field day in redefining oil and gas markets, and in so doing the global climate trajectory.

By default, oil producers are setting the energy transition pace by determining how much oil and gas to produce.

Hosting and funding of the next COP by UAE, an oil-producing nation, is an indication of the growing conflicted influence of oil producers in setting a self-serving climate agenda.

All is not lost, for indeed significant capital continues to flow into renewable energy technology development and uptake across the world.

It is renewable energy policies and capital allocation by nations and investors that will significantly determine the pace of energy transition, carbon reduction and global warming control.

Unfortunately, in pursuit of geopolitical and economic control, the Global North is selectively instituting restrictions on renewable technologies and supply chains, definitely slowing down the energy transition and prolonging timelines to a carbon-neutral world.

As the world gets its collective climate systems in order, Kenya should be a climate pragmatist and focus on funding and investments that add value to the economy and jobs while modernising our economy with the energy technologies of the future.

Directionally, imported oil and coal should be significantly replaced by renewable energy to conserve foreign exchange while reducing carbon emissions.

The writer is a petroleum consultant. [email protected]